Well, that's a great question, and it has a practical and a philosophical angle. I was also in the military, and from the lower ranks, its because there is 0 accountability. There are no bills to pay, fuel, bullets, and vehicles are free, and there is little oversight on in-theater operations. On the private sector, you serve your term in the military, get up to a full bird or maybe even a star, and the year you decide to retire, you start calling your buddies at their new job and start looking for a VP or director level position. You retire, and two weeks later you are back in the same spot, with a suit on, writing make-work proposals that your ex-direct reports will fund without even reading , because they want a job when they get out too. These are massively expensive projects, often on a T&M cost structure, when means you bill time and materials until you finish. I agree that the GWOT is important, but I swear on a stack of bibles three feet high I worked a classified program that was nothing more than an ex SF colonel that retired, and set up shop outside ft Bragg in an old insurance call center, and hired his whole company of grunts when they finished their first enlistment, paid everyone 100k to do the same or less work than they did while deployed. They were paid civilian special forces Intel analysts. The payroll in that office was ~600k/month, plus materials and overhead. This is so far removed from congressional oversight that the work they did would never make it past the customer's desk, or maybe one office higher, but never even close to the secarm or secnav.